Getting in the Game
by wrldpossibility
Summary: Kate Beckett doesn't remember whether it's morning or night when she wakes up post-surgery. She just knows it's a new day.


**Author's Note:** This fic accompanies THIS FAN ART. Please go check it out, because it's lovely!

Getting in the Game

Kate Beckett doesn't remember whether it's morning or night when she wakes up post-surgery. She just knows it's a new day. The span of time between consciousness and awareness is fuzzier than usual, and in the interim, as she struggles to swim up out of medicated sleep to hit the surface of reality, a single feeling presides. She'd call it warm and fuzzy, if she did warm and fuzzy, which she does not, so instead, she just calls it what it was: a momentary happiness. She casts about in her mind for its source and finds it: that last waking moment, that single memory, that instant in which…yes. Castle loves her. He loves her. She smiles to herself, lying there on her hospital gurney, not even realizing she's doing so.

And then the pain hits. It bursts on her like a grenade, detonating first in her head, behind her eyes, and settling with a deep, throbbing ache across her chest and torso. He loves her, which means she's going to screw this up, as she's screwed up with everyone she's ever cared about. She'll lose him because she's too distant, and too dysfunctional, and too afraid. Everyone always tells her so…eventually, as she watches them leave or leaves them first. She'd thought she just might dodge it with Castle, this curse that began the day her mother died, as long as he never got in the game. She just has to convince him not to try to play these cards she's been dealt.

She can't watch him bet it all on her while she sits here with a losing hand.

By the time Josh makes his morning rounds—her bedside first—she's already decided to break up with him. A vague sense of panic has begun to vie for attention against the acute pain and bone-weary fatigue, because she knows the status quo won't work for her anymore. Not in light of this new information. From the moment she'd awoken, she'd known she has to fix this. And fixing it means facing it. And she can't do that hiding behind a boyfriend who will never be anything more.

Turns out, Josh is the easy part. It takes her three more months to have the guts to face _Castle_.

She's usually comfortable making the first move, whether with a man or a suspect whose door she needs to kick down. But after three months, two of which are spent listening to her own loud thoughts in her father's lakeside cabin, she's not sure which angle from which to approach. Protocol has long since ceased to be second nature.

Seeking him out at the book signing is undeniably cowardly—he can't avoid her in public—but it's also safe, and she's not a woman who can afford to take many risks. She stands in line over twenty minutes, and from her vantage point half a dozen fans back, he looks a decade older than when she'd last seen him, greeting and signing by rote. Perhaps he's finally grown up, but the thought instantly saddens her, and she hopes she's not the cause.

When she lays it all out on the table—the wall and the relationship she can't have, not yet—his eyes never leave hers. He doesn't say those three little words again, but he watches her as though daring her to deny it.

After that, she figures it's just a matter of who blinks first.

They work together well enough that autumn. Too well, actually: they're both too polite, hyper-aware of each other's presence in a room. There's a lot of excuse me's and so sorry's and deference for personal space. Castle's overly careful not to overstep while somehow simultaneously hovering, and Kate doesn't call him on it. Conversely, the guilt of avoiding him all those months and lying to him has made her soft: when he touches her arm or allows a hand to linger on her shoulder, she doesn't pull away.

She decides she owes him that much, and tries not to think about what she owes herself.

Business is booming from September through the holidays (a phrase that's seeped into her vernacular from Esposito, reminding her he may need to complete a session of sensitivity training), giving her precious little time to work her mother's case. The files are at Castle's loft, which he tells her is for her own good. She assumes he means this arrangement provides her with a degree of separation from Gates, but he's oddly closed-mouthed about it, causing her detective-radar to ping.

Whenever she meets him there to go over the case notes, he puts her off. She'd assume he doesn't want to be alone with her in his personal space, but that's not it: usually there's a casual dinner waiting instead, or a pair of opera tickets conveniently deposited on the foyer table, or some other excuse that they do anything but investigate. She'd complain—has every intention of complaining—but never seems to get around to it. She knows he's playing her somehow, but oddly doesn't seem to mind. Instead, she eats his sea-salt crusted salmon, tells him about her day, smiles at his jokes, and is so glad she's there, it makes her chest hurt.

She invites him to her place, too, and by January, she's dropped all pretenses: she doesn't even ask him to bring the files. Instead, they watch movies or eat take-out or talk about anything but work, and when he looks at her, there's still challenge in his eyes. They burn with hurt-love but not resentment, not yet, and it sends a thrill of hope down her spine: there's still time. She hasn't screwed it all up quite yet.

They're getting exactly nowhere on the case, but the wall's coming down anyway, brick by brick.

She's smiling all the time. Thinking about him when he's not around. Smiling some more. On a case in mid-February, Lanie finally cuts to the chase, asking point blank if she's met someone. Kate asks her if it's that obvious, and leaves it at that.

In her therapy sessions, she talks about her mom, and the case, and her powerlessness to solve it. But she no longer feels empty inside as she admits it. Her therapist suggests this may be because she no longer feels alone, as she had the day of the murder. And the day after. And the day after that. And for the first time, she wonders if perhaps, there's more than one way to go about finding retribution.

Castle's always had the ability to catch her off-guard, so Kate shouldn't be surprised when he does it yet again. They're the last two people on the precinct floor at 9 pm, a fact she hadn't quite registered until she'd cleared her desk of paperwork and looked up to a room of empty desks. The only sound is the clang of something metal and hiss of something mechanical followed by Castle's curses coming from the break room, and so she heads there to see if he wants to share a cab. He comes out of the doorway just as she's coming in, some sort of cappuccino machine part in hand, and they collide…hard. He nearly puts her on her ass.

As she stumbles back, he reaches for her, catching her around the waist and drawing her closer—perhaps—than he'd planned. His overcompensation causes them to collide again, the lengths of their bodies smashing flat against one another as Kate's elbow hits his chin. He groans, and she yells out an apology, and then they're both laughing. It's late and they're punch-drunk after a too-long day, and they laugh harder.

By the time they stop, Kate gasping for breath and still smiling, he's still holding her, and he doesn't let go. The look in his eyes is the same as ever, but suddenly without the caution. The smile dies on her lips, and she meets his gaze before reaching her hand to the back of his neck and drawing him to her. He kisses her experimentally, and then hard, and harder, until her personal space is his personal space, and in her spinning, grasping mind, her fears become his fears, her pain his pain. The sound of her wall crashing down is loud in her ears.

And then only one brick remains. She lets it fall later that night, lying naked against him, curled together into the cocoon of her living room couch.

"There's something I need to tell you," she says, letting the rise and fall of his chest set the pace of her words.

He doesn't lift his head, but raises one arm to stroke a hand through her hair falling down her back.

"You know that feeling you get when you wake up happy, but for a moment, you don't remember why?"

She feels him smile against her chin. "I do."

She knows he's thinking of now and she's thinking of then, but continues anyway. "I had that feeling…the morning after I was shot."

He stirs beneath her as he shifts his head to look at her. "After you were shot. You were happy." It's both a question and not a question.

"I had a happy memory, just for a moment, before the pain hit…well, everywhere." She pauses, reminding herself she's a brave person, and can't back out now, anyway. "Before I had time to think, 'why do I hurt everywhere', I thought, 'what was that good thing?'" She takes a breath, then turns her head away to say the remainder to the far wall of her living room. "And I remembered: you'd said you loved me."

"I…you heard me."

His tone is oddly flat, and it scares her. "Yes. I remembered. I…do…remember."

He's quiet for a moment. His breathing is still even under her chest, his hand heavy on the crown of her head. Then he settles further down against the cushions of the couch. "And it was a good memory."

Again with the statements. But, Kate supposes, they're done with interrogation. "One that changed everything, at least for me."

"Josh."

"Yes."

"Therapy."

"Yes."

"The ability to let the case go?"

"For now. Yes."

"Ok, then."

It was her turn to lift her head in surprise. "Really?" She had been so terrified of this admittance, she couldn't fathom why he was already at terms with it.

"Kate, I'm a writer. It's my job to read people like books."

"You knew. That I knew."

He nuzzles back under her, steadying her body over him with one hand. His teasing, arrogant tone, the one she loves to hate, has found its way back. "Of course."

Life without the impenetrable boundary she'd become so accustomed to is difficult, but good-difficult. It's challenging in the way new target practice regs are challenging, or stubborn cases are challenging. What she lacks in armor, she's gained in what really matters: happiness, wholeness, and the ability to be someone who matters to someone else.

On the eve of the anniversary of the cemetery shooting, she gathers with Castle, Esposito, Ryan, and the other officers and family members who'd been on scene. It hadn't been planned, not officially: it had started with just her and Castle at the Haunt, followed by a few beers and a few phone calls. By midnight, they're all together around a table, one-upping each other with Montgomery anecdotes, laughing and toasting. At final call, Kate catches Castle's eye, and he winks, and instead of feeling exposed, she sits back smiling, finally at peace with her transparency.

When they leave a few minutes later, they take the same cab to the same address without bothering to discuss it first. Traffic is light, and they speed down Greenwich as though on rails. The city rolls out on both sides of the grimy glass windows, never looking so good. She wonders when she'd last noticed at it this way, cast in the glow of neon and glitter and in the company of someone she loves.

She decides that's the thing about walls. When they come down, whole new territory opens up on the other side.


End file.
